I was thinking. Life is only experience, it has a beginning and an end and each day as we live toward death, we decide whether to expand or contract our experience. There is no overcoming it, we die, we all die; no matter how undeserving we imagine a person to be, no matter how undeserving we imagine ourselves to be; we all end up dead. The fact that we, you and I, exist is a mathematical impossibility; 750,000,000 years ago, an amoeba fucked an amoeba to propagate our genes for another generation and so on through the millennia. If they hadn’t fucked, you and I wouldn’t be. You and I will never happen again. We only exist because of luck, blind, stupid, arbitrary luck, luck we had nothing to do with. Three, ten, twenty, ninety years of consciousness is all we get; one day, we will all die tomorrow. And to spend this existential moment, this spark of existence on a time scale that measures our human years with dozens of zeros, pursuing material and social appurtenance beyond well-being is so shallow, so daft, so beneath our intelligence, so unworthy of the random good fortune we all bear and that will soon be over to never occur again, regardless the zeros. Experience your life.
Damn it’s a beautiful evening here in Cleveland, Mississippi. I spent the day riding north from Natchez on Highway 61, The Blues Highway. My motel room cost $50.00. No coffee, no wi-fi.
Last night in Natchez, I stayed at John Quitman’s house, a National Historic Landmark. Quitman owned four plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana and four hundred people. The estate is described in writings as antebellum, a fancy word that means Quitman’s enormous wealth, acquired through slave labor, was acquired legally. Quitman died in 1858, his daughter sold the estate in 1914. These days, they call it the Monmouth Historic Inn & Gardens.
There is a malaise about the Historic Inn & Gardens, a brooding sense that something’s not right, a haunting guilt that within the painstakingly manicured gardens, fountains, statues and period-decorated rooms and canopy beds, that we’re celebrating a history better left to revile; that the savagery and human suffering that built those buildings and planted those hedges is a tragedy rather than a weekend getaway.
As I wandered the grounds and read the signs and placards, I learned that in 1834 Quitman purchased 15 people among them Harry Nichols who became his personal valet. In modern times, it’s tempting for the visitor to see the busy black serving people and the bald white manager with his wetted lips and ingratiating smile, as direct decedents of the antebellum state. And maybe they are. And maybe it’s just a job.
Later in the evening, I laid alone on the well-manicured grass in the dark and stared at the stars and thought about all the people over the centuries that had laid on their backs in that same spot or near to it and stared at those same stars through their pain, rage and despair; a torment that the black and white abstractions of words can only fail to describe. Indeed, we are insulated from the brutality and anguish of our history by centuries of failing words. The faces that stared at those same stars for all those hundreds of years, those same damn stars, stared accusingly back at me. That is our history.
It’s been two hundred years but there are signs of wear. My fellow guests at the Monmouth were white, mostly older and overweight, and drove newer mid-price sedans. They smiled at me at breakfast, a curiosity with my motorcycle hair, my jeans and my Equal Justice Initiative t-shirt (from the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama; a token protest). The drive into the estate is rutted and unpaved, shutters are askew and need paint, the gift shop sells expensive white-lady jewelry, the much-vaunted breakfast was eggs, grits, bacon and clumsily sliced cantaloupe and musk melon; Waffle House is just as good. The room was fine, I don’t think I’ve slept in a canopy bed before. My trip into antebellum history cost $200.00.
In Morgan City, Louisiana I stayed at the Morgan City Motel, a small, lonely $60.00 room.
Jim’s room was directly across the parking lot from mine, he was sitting on the front step smoking a cigarette. Sixty and the first mate on a tug, he joined the Navy when he was eighteen and has spent his life at sea. He’s worked with the same crew for twenty years; 28 days at sea, 14 days off. The tug is used to tow heavy equipment between land and deep-sea oil rigs, It’s another week before he ships out again. He’s been married twice and getting his second divorce and is worried about their ten-year old son. He takes medication for his blood pressure.
I went back to my room and rolled a joint and sat on the front step and after a few minutes, Juan shuffled across the parking lot with his cane and his cigarette and asked to sit next to me. Juan’s seventy-six; he was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in New York City. He’s married to a woman who lives in Virginia Beach, he hasn’t seen her in thirteen years. Juan started in the Navy, too, and has spent his career at sea, tugs, cargo ships, tankers. He’s seen so many places, Cairo, the Philippines, Alaska, the Eiffel Tower.
Juan’s got neuropathy in his feet and struggles to walk. I asked him if he had family in town or friends. He told me he’d shipped out of Morgan City many years ago, he’d liked the town and so he came back. He’s been at the Morgan City Motel for a couple of months, he came from Florida. He doesn’t know anybody in Morgan City except the motel staff and fellow residents; it was like he didn’t have anyplace else to go. Herbert, the maintenance man at the motel, has been making sure he gets out of bed in the morning and takes his meds. He used to have a motorized scooter but it was stolen. He’s worried about immigrants and crime, he talked about it at length. When I got up in the morning, there was an ambulance at Juan’s door. Herbert had called for it.
I went on a swamp tour with Captain Caviar. He spent thirty years fishing for choupique (pronounced “shoe pick”) for their caviar, and so the sobriquet. He sold the business and now Captain Caviar spends his days wandering the swamps with tourists, he gets a lot of Germans. A Russian couple in tall waterproof boots wanted to be dropped off on an island, he refused, too dangerous. The two of us spent four hours motoring the wide and tiny channels of the bayous under a deep blue sky and picture-perfect clouds, the Spanish moss-dangling over our heads from the live oak and cypress, the snow white egrets, the deafening silence when he turned off the engine, the alligators’ invisible presence. Our vessel was a 20’ flat bottomed aluminum boat with a 150-horsepower Suzuki outboard that pushed us fast on the big channels and was whisper quiet so I could only just hear it in the narrows. We motored past Pirate Island, famous for its booty; the booty rumored to be buried there by the pirate Jean Lafitte and the booty driven off the island by mosquitos after just one day on the TV show Naked and Afraid. He pointed to the shore where somebody caught a 13’ 1” gator just the other day.
When I got back to the motel, Herbert told me that Juan had been transferred to a larger hospital in Baton Rouge.
I ran into Colonel Sawyer on Facebook, he’s retired in Pensacola. We had breakfast at Waffle House.
Captain Sawyer was my Commanding Officer when I arrived at the 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, the 1/1 Cav, at O’Brien Barracks in Schwabach, West Germany, September, 1975. He’d joined the Army as an enlisted man, 11-Bravo, Infantry; a grunt. In 1964, he was sent to Viet Nam as an adviser. He later went to OCS, Officer Candidate School, and was commissioned as an officer. He retired as a Lieutenant Colonel.
I was his Jeep driver in the 1/1 Cav and at breakfast, he complimented me on his memories of my map-reading skills; navigation mistakes are bad when you’re leading a two-kilometer long convoy of tracks and wheels on tiny German roads; it’s hard to turn things around. But he needed sleep so he told me where we needed to go and I followed the pencil-line roads on the plastic-laminated Army map with klicks-instead-of-miles and thickets of contour lines, and steered the convoy while he slept beside me.
We talked about Jeeps, he preferred the old Jeep, the M151, the Jeep I drove for him, to the modern Humvee. In an ambush, he explained, you can roll out of the Jeep and onto the ground in one fast motion whereas you have to open doors and scramble to get out of a Humvee and that takes time. His unit was ambushed several times in Viet Nam.
When my younger brother, Greg, had his backpack stolen while hitchhiking around Europe, Captain Sawyer let him stay in my room in the barracks, against all kinds of Army regulations. Greg slept on the floor next to my bunk in my Army sleeping bag on my Army air mattress. When he arrived, he had no money and hadn’t eaten in days. When the Supply Sergeant was in the latrine, the Cav donated a case of C-rations to the cause. Greg finished them off the week he was with me, that was twelve high-calorie combat meals in addition to the three meals he ate every day in the mess hall.
Colonel Sawyer was interested in my life and I told him highlights. Breakfast was almost three hours.
I sent him an email afterwards that read in part:
“I spent three years on active duty, perhaps the most significant three-year period of my life. The Army taught me a lot about people, about life, about myself. It gave me time to grow up. I came away proud that I’d served, with an admiration for the institution, and with a deep gratitude and a profound respect for the professionals I served under such as yourself. For that I thank you.”
